The Pierce Progressive focuses on Pierce County, Washington. Our mission is to explore issues that are important to our county and present progressive ideas as constructive alternatives for making it a better place to live. We provide background, ongoing reports, and opinion pieces for topics of political importance to our cities and our rural communities.

Leading News

The government system at the federal level has made a major change. One of the major reasons for the change has been a group called “Indivisible.” I am wondering how much we should expect the government change to extend down into the state, county and local levels is because of Indivisible and the excellent guidance provided by the experts from that organization, Move On and similar activist training organizations. Read more

How many times have we heard politicians use that term to refer to a particular U.S. state? It seems to be a required prefix, showing respect for the state’s heritage, culture, importance, and values. It’s similar to a member of Congress from one political party referring to a member of the other party as "my esteemed colleague", or "my friend from across the aisle". Read more

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all." Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland. Read more

I am writing this as a man giving advice to men. I am not addressing gay men, but most of what I write applies to relationships between human beings in general. The #MeToo phenomenon has highlighted the asymmetry in the power of men and women, especially powerful men and less powerful women, that leads to widespread abuse of women by men. Men also experience sexual abuse and there are women who perpetrate sexual abuse, but I focus on men abusing women, since I have heard the stories from women who tell me of the lingering pain of having been abused by men. Read more

Spanaway is not a city, but its population is larger than any town in Pierce County’s part of the Second Legislative District. The largest governing entity in southeast Pierce County is the Bethel School District, and often serves as the connection between students and health care services. Four decades ago, most of the area was rural and consisted mostly of large family farms. As property taxes rose, these farms were broken into parcels, eventually becoming gated communities. While the population continued to grow, services did not follow. Various doctors served the community individually, but could not meet the need for comprehensive care. The Affordable Care Act has made a difference for this community by helping to expand care to those who need it without requiring travel to Tacoma or Puyallup. Read more

Arlie Russell Hochschild, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley, sets out, according to the narrative of her book Strangers in Their Own Land, to discover how to scale the empathy wall between people like herself, West Coast liberals, and the Tea Party conservatives. She picks Tea Party advocates in the state of Louisiana, because she expects them to provide fertile ground for her research on how people make decisions when experiencing emotional dissonance. On the one hand, they see petrochemical corporations destroying their beloved environment and risking their health. On the other hand, they hate government regulation, (which could force those corporations into better practices and force them to clean up the damage they have caused). Read more

Azure Standard, the world’s largest supplier of organic wheat and grains, has been accused of improper management of noxious weeds growing on some of its wheat fields located in Sherman County, Oregon. As a result, it is facing a threat to its organic farming practices and food products. The local county government, based in Moro, Oregon issued a show-order to Azure and its owners, David and Nathan Stelzer, to appear for a public hearing May 17, 2017, and demanded a revised weed-management plan. If found out-of-compliance, Azure’s organic farm fields may be chemically treated by court-order, possibly with potent herbicides like Roundup or Milestone, and then forced to pay for it. Read more

In this year's trip to the market, the Washington state legislature is faced with a significant challenge. To understand that challenge we must first fall back to the state constitution where the "founding fathers" sought to explain the reason for wanting to create a state and be allowed to share in the tax money that Washington DC had previously claimed, when what was to become Washington state was clearly an uncontested part of the United States. As a part of the explanation, they included in their constitution of the state of Washington our forebears thought that a fundamental of the duties of the new state would be education. Specifically, ARTICLE IX – EDUCATION: SECTION 1 PREAMBLE. “It is the paramount duty of the state to make ample provision for the education of all children residing within its borders, without distinction or preference on account of race, color, caste, or sex.” Read more

James Baldwin had planned a book about his friends: Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Remember This House. He never finished it, but Raoul Peck attempts to do that in his new film, I Am Not Your Negro. The film's narration by Samuel L. Jackson comes entirely from the manuscript. We hear also Baldwin himself in various historical film clips. Baldwin says in the narration, "History is not the past. It is the present." Peck takes Baldwin at his word and intersperses film clips from the Rodney King beating, the riots in Ferguson, and other more recent examples of brutality against blacks with clips from Baldwin's time. Read more